The view from my window - Forbes Building update

Sarah Wallace-Johnson, the Museum’s Conservator, updates us on progress with the Forbes Building at West Cambridge.

Category: General

Posted by: Sarah

Taking shape outside my office is the Sedgwick Museum’s new facility for storing its rock collections and some of the larger fossils that are currently housed in storage that makes access to them difficult. Once completed, it will provide high-quality, high-density, climate controlled storage for this internationally important collection. Bringing several collections together into this purpose-built space will mean that specimens will be much more accessible for research, while the building will provide enhanced facilities for research workers. We will be able to host public events and show people around our collections in a way that we can’t do at the moment.

Building started in October, and for the first three months, the project focused almost entirely on laying the foundations and floor: they are complex and built to a high specification due to the weight of the rock collection that they need to support. During pile-driving for the foundations, we were able to collect fossils from the clay found deep below the building, and look forward to using them in future public engagement projects.

Now, in March, the steel frame has been erected, bricklaying has started and the roof is going on. Behind the scenes we are planning the move. More than 350,000 rocks, weighing more 150,000kg will need to be carefully packed and transported across West Cambridge. They are rocks from all over the world, amassed over the last 200 years. The collection is still growing, added to by many researchers working in the dynamic field of Earth Sciences. A project like this takes huge amount of planning, and there will be many opportunities for volunteers to get involved in this exciting project – watch this space.

Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the North-West Passage has often been in the news ever since he left England on the 19th May, 1845 never to return. Successive searches throughout the 19th century eventually found artefacts and human remains. But it was not until 2014 the wreck of Franklin’s ship, HMS Erebus was found and two years later the wreck of HMS Terror. Now the extraordinary story of HMS Erebus is receiving new publicity thanks to the publication of Michael Palin’s new book – ‘Erebus : the story of a ship’. Whilst the earliest searches did not find any traces of Franklin and his crew, one of them, led by Captain Kellett did find a superb mammoth tusk, which is now part of the Sedgwick Museum’s Ice Age display.

Publications

'Tools of the Trade'Available to purchase in the Sedgwick Museum shop

Agostino Scilla's'Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense'English translation available to download.

Friends of the Sedgwick Museum prizewinners give us their thoughts on their time at the Museum in 2016Click here to readWork Experience at the Sedgwick - read about our latest student to visit us for two weeks and experience life in a Museum.